British TV Presenter: CNN's Piers Morgan Showed Me How To Hack

CNN's Piers Morgan arrives at the inaugural BAFTA Brits to Watch 2011 event at the Belasco Theater in Los Angeles.

Chris PizzelloAP

CNN host Piers Morgan has been dragged into the U.K.'s hacking scandal once again.

This time, the host of the BBC's Newsnight told a media ethics inquiry that Morgan had showed him how to hack into a cell phone's voice mail.

SkyTV reports that Jeremy Paxman remembered a lunch from September 2002 for two reasons: First because Morgan seemed to imply that he had heard a conversation between another TV presenter Ulrika Jonsson and England football manager Sven-Goran Eriksson.

"I don't know if he was repeating a conversation he had heard or he was imagining this conversation," Paxman said, according to Sky News.

Later during that lunch, said Paxman, Morgan asked him if he had a password on his mobile's voicemail.

"He then explained the way to get access to people's messages was to go to the factory default setting and press either 0000 or 1234 and that if you didn't put on your own code, his words, 'You're a fool'," Paxman said.

Morgan was the editor of News of the World, a Rupert Murdoch-owned tabloid that has been at the center of a scandal about illegal wiretapping. Morgan then went on to edit the Mirror. And now he hosts a nightly interview show on CNN.

The AP reports that Morgan has denied any involvement or knowledge into the hacking practices of the publications.

"The testimony by the British news anchor was not the first to suggest Morgan might have had familiarity with unethical practices during his time at the Daily Mirror.

"Last December, a former Daily Mirror journalist told the same inquiry that phone hacking was considered a "standard journalistic tool" at the tabloid once run by the CNN host. One-time business columnist James Hipwell said he believed that hacking by Mirror reporters was a daily routine."

Even earlier than that in July, Morgan was thrust into the spotlight by a British parliamentarian who not only accused Morgan of hacking but also of boasting about his hacking.